My husband texted me a smartphone photo in the middle of a work day, shot in an alley less than a block from home while he was on a lunchtime dog-walking break. I could see that Penny’s big ears were perked with interest at a hawk in the alley, and that the hawk registered her interest. Its wings were slightly raised away from its body, as if threatening the dog.

The other rescue, Dorothy, who vibrates with alertness 24-7, probably already had spotted the big bird and identified it as something she would get yelled at for lunging toward. She made a big show of looking the other way, my husband says, and feigning disinterest.

What instantly worried me was that the raptor had let the trio get that close without flying away. I called my husband with follow-up questions.

In many inner-city neighborhoods, hawk sightings have become common as suburbs spread. In the countryside, hawks hunt for rats, mice, squirrels, rabbits and sometimes songbirds. With fields replaced by subdivisions, hawks have to venture into populated areas for food.

In Old East Dallas, hawks are visible in winter high over the leafless tall, old elms or perched in mature pecans overlooking backyards busy with bird feeders and bulb-eating squirrels. Pairs build nests in those tall trees, too, in late winter and raise their young where food is in ready supply.

More than once I have seen a hawk swoop through my backyard after a pigeon or plump dove. More than once the city chickens have gone eerily quiet, and I have looked up to eventually spot a hawk on a branch overhead, still and waiting.

No, my husband said, the hawk never flew. He went back to check on it, and it was on top of a privacy fence in the same vicinity. It was still there when he checked a third time.

I don’t know the first thing about capturing a raptor without hurting it more, or getting myself hurt, so I called 911 Wildlife, a North Texas business that humanely traps and removes dangerous or wounded wildlife from homes and businesses.

By the time I got a call back, however, it was dark. Owner Bonnie Bradshaw and I agreed we would wait until morning to see if I could locate the bird again, and she gave me the name and number of a permitted raptor rehabilitator in Dallas. The rehabilitator, Bradshaw said, could tell me how to capture the hawk in hopes its life could be saved, or her employees would try to capture it.

I did find the bird in the alley the next morning — dead. It was a beautiful red-tail hawk.

I could see no wounds. I was concerned someone had shot it, or it had eaten a poisoned rat. I assumed its neck had not been broken by, for instance, flying into a second-story window. Knowing hawks, like all birds except English sparrows, starlings and feral pigeons, are protected by federal law, I wondered about my responsibility for proper disposal. Besides, it seemed hard-hearted to leave it in the alley.

Carolyn Brueggeman has been tending hurt birds since the mid-1980s. She limits her volunteer work to raptors and has the state and federal permits to do so legally. A mini-hospital in her backyard, with running water, lighting, heating, cooling and cages, is where the birds are treated until they have healed and can be released into the wild, when possible.

She also winds up being a busy surrogate mother to orphaned hawks and owls from May to September. She already has received 28 birds this year. She was expecting a shipment of 500 frozen mice when I spoke with her earlier in the week.

Brueggeman agreed to examine the dead bird to see if she could determine its cause of death by a simple physical exam. One neighbor found a cardboard box, another agreed to take the body to Brueggeman for the post-mortem.

She called me to say she found no evidence of injury, old or new; no pellet wounds; no sign of trauma. Had the hawk been poisoned, my husband would have noticed it convulsing, vomiting, acting shaky, she says.

The female red-tail, however, was very, very thin. Brueggeman could pinch its breastbone, which, in a healthy bird, would have been padded with flesh — like one of Bo Pilgrim’s chickens.

Brueggeman speculated the hawk had slowly starved to death.

She has seen a lot of emaciated raptors in the last several years. The prolonged drought has killed the seeds and grains that feed mice, “so they have not been reproducing,” she says.

When she and helpers look for suitable places to release rehabilitated raptors, they have noticed it is more and more difficult to find the signs of a food supply. “We look for droppings from little critters, and we have not found any.”

Signs this year, she says, indicate the cycle of life on the North Texas prairie may be edging back toward normal.

Once I got chickens, my attitude about hawks changed. I would never harm one, federally protected or not, but I did not project a warm welcome. Fellow henkeepers’ reports to the contrary, Brueggeman tells me a hawk would have to be a big one and a hen would have to be undersize for it to become a hawk’s chicken dinner.

But nature (and backyard birdfeeders) has provided an excess of squirrels, pigeons and rats in my neighborhood, and the hawks are welcome to them. Especially if urban prey can fix the broken link in the food supply caused by another year of low rainfall.

Sick or injured birds

Federal and state permits are required for citizen rehabilitators to treat wounded and sick birds. Texas Parks & Wildlife, on its website, lists permitted wildlife rehabilitators by county at state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/ rehab/list/.

Rehabilitators are volunteers and consider themselves to be performing community service. With no state funds available for supplies, food and utility bills, volunteers depend upon donations to help defray expenses.

Rat poison’s unintended victims

Rat poison set out in attics, garages and tool sheds often winds up also killing owls and hawks, says 911 Wildlife’s Bonnie Bradshaw. When natural predators are killed, she says, the rat population explodes.

“When people call us and they are having problems with rats, we give them all kinds of ways to solve rodent problems without using poisons,” says Bradshaw, whose North Texas company specializes in humane nuisance-animal removal.

First, she says, property owners should find and seal rodents’ entry points, such as holes in exterior walls and where plumbing, electrical, telephone and cable pipes and wiring enter their building.

Second, “use snap traps instead of poison” to kill rats. Instead of the long-available wood-and-wire spring versions, Bradshaw says Bell Labs’ widely available Trapper T-Rex snap trap is more humane and relies on its mechanism of interlocking teeth for securing and killing the animal.

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About Mariana Greene

Mariana Greene is a Dallas freelance writer. She writes the Gardening Fool column and reports on home and garden topics in North Texas, with special interests in cottage gardening, provincial antiques, the Arts & Crafts era in the United States and England and urban henkeeping.